Katherine Barlow is Green Lake’s only schoolteacher. She is a very pretty and kind person. Everyone in the town loves her jarred peaches (the same jarred peaches that Zero and Stanley found under the boat named “Mary Lou”). Because the town’s one-room schoolhouse needs repairs, Katherine trades her jarred peaches for the handiwork of Sam the Onion Man. During the time Sam makes the repairs to the schoolhouse, Katherine and Sam fall in love. At that time, a relationship between a black man and a white woman was illegal and unacceptable in Green Lake; the community members are intolerant. They destroy the schoolhouse and, as Sam and Katherine try to escape in his rowboat named after his donkey, Mary Lou, they kill Sam and rescue Katherine, against her wishes.
Three days later, Katherine shoots the town sheriff, who would not help her save Sam from the townspeople, and she becomes Kissin’ Kate Barlow, a ruthless outlaw of the Wild West. Kissin’ Kate Barlow kisses each man that she kills. She is vengeful and becomes an outlaw because of her grief and anger over the loss of Sam and the way the community members treated him. Kissin’ Kate robs Stanley’s great-grandfather as he rides a stagecoach to California. She doesn’t kill him, but she leaves him stranded in the middle of the desert (near Green Lake).
Twenty years later, Kissin’ Kate is living in the same cabin the Warden is living in today. Trout Walker and his wife break in to Kissin’ Kate’s cabin and intend to torture her until she tells them where she has stashed her loot. Instead of giving them an answer, Kissin’ Kate is bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard and dies.
